Armored Victory 1945 Steven Zaloga
US Army Tank Combat in the European Theater from the Battle of the Bulge to Germany ’s Surrender
Stackpole Books, copyright 2012
At heart I am a fairly serious tank buff (from a modeling perspective) with my interest,
primarily, centered on WWII US
and German vehicles. This last week I had an opportunity to get three of Steven
Zaloga’s more recent books on the US
armored forces during WWII in Europe . The
first to arrive was “Armored Victory 1945”. This is actually the second volume
in a two volume set and just happened to be the first of the three books to
arrive.
This is my first Zaloga book that was not published by
Osprey. This is essentially a collection of photographs culled by Zaloga, mostly, from the WWII US Army Signal Corps photo collection. It is divided into
chapters with a very short introduction at the beginning of each chapter. Each
photograph has its own caption with quite a bit of information and often including the location and the unit that the vehicle belonged to. I
know I have seen at least a third of these photographs in other publications
but the rest were new to me and the caption information, even on photographs I have seen, is almost invaluable . The bulk of the photographs feature the numerous varieties of M4 Sherman tank, but almost all US armored
vehicles appear on the pages. There are more photos here of the M24 Chaffee ( nicknamed the Pantherpup but GIs) and M26 Pershing (Designated the T26 at the time of their deployment) than I have seen anywhere else.
Pages feature 2 – 3 photographs with captions and if I had
a criticism it would be here. When there are 3 photographs on a page they tend
to be a little to small to make out all the details that interest me as a modeler.
That’s about the worst thing I can say about this book. There is a huge variety
of photographs, including plenty of examples of knocked (some still
burning) US and German tanks. In fact if you are interested in modeling a
knocked out vehicle this book as more pictures of destroyed Shermans, Panthers,
Jagdpanzers, Hetzers and Jadgtigers than I have seen in a single collection.
If you are a WWII US Army armor buff then this is a must
have for your collection. The list price is $44.95 but I think I paid about
half that getting it through Amazon.
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